We've been using slack for new projects at work lately. We used Skype in the past and still do for calls, screen sharing and one-on-one chats but slack channels are a far better fit for team chats and keeping track of conversations related to a specific projects.

One thing that has always annoyed me a tiny bit is the delay when clicking on links due to slack linking to slack-redir.net which then redirects to the actual link location. Popping open the Chrome dev-tools reveals that slack uses an onclick handler to change the anchor element's href to https://slack-redir.net...:

<a href="http://www.danyow.net/aurelia-binding-behaviors/" data-referer-safe="1" onclick="this.href=&quot;https://slack-redir.net/link?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.danyow.net%2Faurelia-binding-behaviors%2F&quot;" onmouseover="this.href=TS.utility.referer_safe_url_map[&quot;http%3A%2F%2Fwww.danyow.net%2Faurelia-binding-behaviors%2F&quot;]" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.danyow.net/aurelia-binding-behaviors/</a>

With a few lines of javascript we can replace these "slow" links with direct ones:

var links = document.querySelectorAll('a[onclick^=this\\.href\\=\\"https\\:\\/\\/slack-redir]'),
    link,
    i = links.length;
while (i--) {
  link = links[i];
  link.removeAttribute('onclick');
  link.parentNode.replaceChild(link.cloneNode(true), link);
}

And with a few more lines of json this can be rolled into a chrome extension:

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "name": "slack-direct",
  "description": "Love Slack? Hate slack-redir? Use slack-direct!",
  "author": "Jeremy Danyow",
  "icons": {
    "128": "icon128.png"
  },
  "version": "1.0",
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": ["https://*.slack.com/*"],
      "js": ["main.js"]
    }
  ]
}

Which brings me to...

slack-direct

A Chrome extension that removes pesky trip to slack-redir.net when clicking on links in slack.

Get slack-direct at the Chrome Web Store. Checkout the source code on GitHub.